not even organized crime, just... douches

but yes, definitely a pump and dump

Basically, yeah.

It's not about the art. It's super fucking disingenuous. It's about money. People buy NFTs solely to sell them later for more money, to people who plan to do exactly the same thing. It's the main reason people buy cryptocurrency these days.

It's like a Ponzi scheme in that the only money coming out comes from new people buying in. It's like a pyramid scheme in that people know this, but they don't care.

A critical component to a pyramid scheme is to convince the middle people that they're in on the profiting part of the scheme.

We should most certainly be in that middle scheme where greedy wannabe scammers get scammed but holy hell humanity is not impressing me with its collective common sense at this point, so maybe not. Still not gonna touch them with a ten foot pole and I hope the corporate ones starting up get busted by the SEC.